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Freenet 0.5 Released
An anonymous reader submits "After over a year in the making, Freenet 0.5 stable has been released. This new version is far superior to previous versions of Freenet."
The announcement specifically thanks Matthew Toseland, "without whom this release would still be vaporware," noting "On the 11th of November, Matthew will no longer be able to work full-time unless more people donate, so please give whatever you can spare at our Donations page."
I just would like to be the first to say a big "Thank you!" to the entire FreeNet team.
When I first heard of FreeNet, I thought, "I live in America, what would I need of this?" No, this isn't a troll. I was happy and complacent and slightly distrustful of the Big Bad Brother. Now the purpose of a network like FreeNet has become quite clear, as I'm neither happy nor complacent and I'm more distrustful of Big Brother with each passing day, as he takes further swipes at the freedoms my Constitution tells me I'm supposed to have.
Thanks, FreeNet, for standing up. More importantly, thanks for the foresight. Imagine if they'd waited until it was really necessary.
I thought that Freenet just received a large 'donation' from Abiword's PayPal account a few weeks ago. :^)
... is a little lacking. Having dl'ded and installed the program, I can't seem to connect to anything. Helpfiles are not helpful. Being a computer geek and not getting it running in 2 minutes flat annoys me to no end. Cool Idea thou.
I am the Barber of Seville.
Please remember NOT to set yourself as anything other than a transient node, unless you have a great big fat unfirewalled Internet pipe and never turn your PC off.
Really. There is nothing more annoying than broken links on Freenet which takes ages to resolve.
the package appears to not be gzipped (despite the suffix). Hence use tar -xf freenet-0.5.0.tgz. Also the shell scripts in the package don't have the proper executable attributes set so that also needs to be modified. After that just follow the instructions :)
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
Ugh! Bad time to be asking for donations via Paypal!
Please set your node up as non-transient as long as you're online most of the time (where most is something like 75% and above). The network desperately needs non-transient nodes (high bandwidth is not that important). Also, your anonymity is a lot higher when running a non-transient node.
Yeah.... but what is it? P2P? Blogger? Messenger?
/.'ed and needs more bandwidth, well that's just tough. With freenet I put info on freenet that is connected to some sort of name (I don't fully get how that works). Then freenet somehow determines where to actually store that data, in parts, depending on demand and who running freenet has bandwidth; ie what freenet clients to store parts of the file. Then if somebody is running freenet they can run some 3rd party freenet client (or any normal internet client I think) and enter 127.0.0.1:8888 followed by the name of the link. This queries freenet (that is running on your computer) and figures out where that data is stored and the most efficient way to retrieve it. One of the interesting things is nobody knows what data is being stored on there computer so nobody can feel guilty for that info. Of course that cuts both ways. You may feel guilty for every bit of naughty data spread by freenet because it may have come from your computer.
As I understand it, it is none of those things... but it can facilitate those things. What it is is kind of a different paradigm for the internet. At the moment with the internet I type in an address and I get data from the person who has registered that address - if he has the bandwidth. I know who is sending the info and who posted it. And if that person has spare bandwidth or is being
If I'm wrong anywhere please correct. Or if I'm right but kind of shaky please reassure me. Hope this helps
It is. The store is cryptographically opaque; you don't know what you're hosting. Whether it's possible to identify whether a particular item is in the store when you know its key, I'm not sure.
2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.
It's necessary for a distributed-storage system where the injection point needs to be distanced from the storage points. Data flows to where it's being requested, so you could keep an item in your own store by requesting it automatically every so often. It won't go anywhere else, but it will stay in the keyspace should it ever be requested later on. You could do much the same thing to prolong the longevity of someone else's data that you valued -- but again, it would tend to live only on your own node if no other nodes were requesting it.
The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.
OTOH, I think the most likely impact on freedom of speech is
On the whole, I think in resonably open societies, suc a the US and Uk still are, the only sane option is `publish and be damned'. That way they at least have to be somewhat public in acting against you. If you hide, they can attack you in hiding, perhaps by attacking everyone who looks a little like you.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
On the contrary, FreeNet is used by a lot of Chinese people as it's a good way of distributing information without being traced. Right now freedom of speech may not be a problem for us, but we're lucky.
For which reason, tools like Freenet are banned in China and a number of other nations.
There does exist a tricky bit of how to deliver such technologies to the people in need of them; possession of crypto is still a crime in much of the world, much less crypto intended to do that which oppressive regimes cannot allow.
How about Fulan Gong practitioners being able to post or read information about their religion in a country that bans and outlaws it?
How about women in the middle east being able to safely find information about women's rights in other countries, and possibly even using such a network as medium for creating political change in their own countries?
How about cuban, south african, (name your favorite country here) being able to safely speak out against atrocities performed by their own governments or provide proof of such acts without fear of retaliation?
How about americans being able to express their disagreement with current "anti-terrorist" laws or actions of the Bush administration without fear of ending up on some FBI list as a potential terrorist or disadent?
One of the interesting things is nobody knows what data is being stored on there (sic) computer
The one thing that always makes me wonder with Freenet is the potential liability for hosting 'questionable' content. If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself. In fact, by hosting a node, it could be argued that I am soliciting for files of that nature.
Whilst the files are presumably encrypted in transit and on disk, its still an illegal file stored on my system.
Makes you think anyway....
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
It is nice to see that one can get +5 Informative by simply copying the What is Freenet? page and saying that it is a bit like Kazza.
It is not like Kazza! This is because it is not spyware and has/will never be accused of being. It is an open source (GPLed) reaction to the growing restrictions of the on-line rights of expression. The point is not that you can copy your warez and p0rn, the point is that you can express yourself anonymously.
Dear moderators, if you haven't read the article and followed at least some of the link, do not moderate! Does "...some kind of a cross between Kazza..." and "...provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth..." sound like something written by the same author in the same message?
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it. But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal ways.
On the other hand, the fact is that the more popular information is better found, and the marginal info is hard to obtain.
Moreover, the control of the net is in the hands of users. If this technology became a widely used criminal tool, people would decide to turn off their servers and the proyect would die. The purpose of the FreeNet will be decided by the majority.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
[Whore mode on]
Whats new in 0.5
Far too many improvements have occured between the 0.3 series and the newly stable 0.5 release. A few highlights are in order, though:
* Security
o Strong public-key cryptography used for inter-node communication which prevents man-in-the-middle attacks.
o Node announcement protocol which eliminates the need for any central directory.
o File-sizes enforced to a power-of-two to prevent traffic analysis.
* Publishing
o Support for splitfiles and redundant encoding (improves reachability of large files)
o Enhanced Freenet Client Protocol (FCP) for application developers.
* Usability
o FProxy (The Freenet Gateway) beautified and improved
o Node Status information readily available
* Resource Utilization
o Improvements made in performance, memory usage, and threading.
* Tool Support
o Many third party tools ready for website authoring, bulletin-board style discussions, and some near completion like Internet Streaming Radio, and more.
And perhaps most importantly, It Just Works!
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Getting source code doesn't mean that entire product goes down the drain. I legally cannot start to sell my own WinXP clone compiled from original source code. There're laws and other measures that prevents such practices.
Information (knowledge) itself isn't good or bad. It's just that: human knowledge. It's entirely upon human being what he does with the knowledge. Man should be held accountable for his deeds not for what he knows.
I know how to make explosives and yet I don't make them. Almost every high school student knows how to make nuke and (surprise, surprise) almost nobody is trying to make one. Just because I possess the information (in your case the source code) it doesn't mean I'm criminal. Nobody has the right to tell me what I'm allowed to know. And that's exactly what Big Brother is trying to do - prevent people from having the information he doesn't want them to know, and to criminalize people who possess such kind of information. Freenet is designed to fight this information slavery.
This observation is inevitable. Let's do some basic business logic:
- [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
- [Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
- [Assume] You have a finite customer base
- [Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
- [Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
- [Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
- [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run
Microsoft is having this problem right now with their operating systems. See, Windows 95 is good enough for most people. It runs AOL/MSN, Word, Outlook Express, Solitaire, and their printer. What more do they need? The MS solution has been to release a new OS every 2 years and hype the hell out of it, as well as purposely not provide patches for their older versions to support newer hardware, thus forcing software upgrades when old boxes die (since the older hardware isn't sold any more). The problem is, people are catching on, and new OS sales are fewer and fewer these days. The same could probably be said for purchases of Office. Who needs more Excel or Powerpoint templates? Anyone?The product business is fine if the product has a finite lifetime. Take housing, for instance. People will always need to repair and build houses, because they weather. Software doesn't, which means the only money to be made long-term on software is in support. The same argument applies to patents and other 'intellectual property'. Dolby has the right idea: come up with an idea, and license it until the end of time.
Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow. Distributing the software online only speeds it up.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Why don't you do the same if you care about free speech? Freenet is already used by the chinese opposition. Some european countries like france, greece and germany already censor the internet, so freenet is also important for western "democracies".
Some day soon something like freenet will be nessecary even in the US if you want to say something critical about bush or ashcroft without getting on some list of potential terrorists.
regards,
mrright
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Yes, its not so simple.
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Unfortunately, censorship increasingly is becoming easy (with Palladium, etc.). As information transfer gets increasingly automated (ie happens via the internet) then censorship becomes automated, too.
We get forced to a hard choice: either censorship, or freedom. Freedom means not being able to censor the stuff we don't like (racism, paedophilia, etc). We have to look to other ways to fight these
If you believe in freedom of speech, then your're defending that right for your enemies, too. Free speech means spending some of the rest of my life countering the arguments of holocaust deniers,etc.
But I'd rather do that than live without whistleblowers, in a world where employers, politicians, etc can use technologies like palladium to convince us all is right in the world, and stop us from hearing about, and _fixing_ the cruelties that exist. I don't believe for a second that most CEO's, etc. out there, given the tech. to prevent bad news of toxic waste , pollution, etc. problems in their factories killing people, would actually fix these problems if they could guarantee their workers could never tell anyone.
Our daily quality of life is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Its not just for wierdo politicos.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
I am currently living in Beijing, China and just tried to access the freenet webpage. Blocked of course. Google searches for "freenet" return 404.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself.
Your question should be modded up. It's one of the most important ones.
The idea behind Freenet's anonymity is plausible deniability. But before I can go into what that means, I need to describe how Freenet works in a little more detail.
There are two different types of Freenet nodes: permanent and transient. If you run a permanent node, it means that you're a full participant in the Freenet network. Your node acts as storage and as a router for requests and inserts. Data moves through Freenet in the form of keys, which are basically the same as files (or in some cases, segments of files) but with cryptic names. Your node caches all the keys that it sees (with least recently used keys being deleted when the node's data store is full, with "full" being defined by the amount of space you choose to let it consume).
Let's say Alice inserts two files into Freenet: the text of Mein Kampf and a picture of Adolf Hitler. She does this using her Freenet node, specifying a hops to live value on the insert. This HTL value is usually around 10 to 15, and is the number of other Freenet nodes that must be talked to. Each node that processes Alice's request decreases the HTL and passes it on to another node. When the last node to get the request sees that HTL is 1, and it still hasn't found Alice's file (because she's the first person to insert it), it returns Data Not Found to the previous node, which passes it to the previous node, etc., all the way back to Alice.
Alice's node gets the "failure" message back, and then sends actual copies of the data files back down the chain. Thus, the files are inserted into Freenet.
Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf. So if someone were to sniff the traffic coming from Alice's machine and decrypt it and discover that her machine was inserting Mein Kampf, then she could claim that she had no knowledge of it; that her machine was simply routing an insert by someone else.
The same goes for requests. Suppose Bob stumbles upon a key which claims to be an ISO image of Windows 2000 Professional and requests a copy of it. His node generates a request with a certain HTL (generally 15 or more for requests), and it's passed along to other nodes until one of them either finds the key, or runs out of hops. The final result (either an error condition or the key he requested) is sent back to Bob's node.
But Bob could claim that he wasn't the person who originally requested that key -- he could say that his node was simply routing someone else's request, and he had no knowledge of it.
The same thing goes for files inside the local node's data store. Just because your node is storing a copy of a nude photo of Ronald Reagan doesn't necessarily mean that you either inserted or requested that file. Your node might simply have acted as a router for someone else's activity, and cached a copy of the key.
Now, all of this protection goes straight out the window if you run a transient node. Transient nodes don't ever act as routers for other nodes -- they're pure leeches. Anything on a transient node is there because you, the node operator, requested or inserted it there. You have no plausible deniability any more.
This explanation is a bit vague, and for that I apologize. The actual routing algorithms and encryption ciphers are a bit beyond my understanding at this time. If you have more detailed questions about how Freenet works, please check the Freenet mailing lists.
That's a very naive view of the legal system. If a friend is sitting in your car with a pound of cocaine in his jacket, you will be arrested on a narcotics distribution charge if a policeman pulls you over and searches the vehicle.
Could you control what the guy had in his jacket? No.
Read about the law. The existance of child pornography in any form on a computer makes you a criminal. Whether you put it there or not, it is your responsibility.
The end result of Freenet will be regulation of encryption.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I don't think you fully understand the technology. Or maybe I don't.
I have 100 bytes on my computer [1], mixed in with 100 million others, all encrypted. It's not a picture, it might be piece of a picture, but even assuming I could decrypt the datastore and take those bytes out it's certainly not recognizable as anything. I don't have the rest of the picture and am not sure who does. I might be able to find out, but I doubt it.
That picture could potentially be child pornography. Assuming it is, am I responsible? Are the other 1000 people who have other pieces responsible? I have 100 bytes of data which I volunteered to store for someone else.
Now assume someone wants to prosecute me.
"Excuse me judge, but where's the evidence (porno)?"
[1] How many bytes is a nitpick I'm not interested in.
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
.
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf.
Uhh, yes there is. Just correlate requests going into and out from the node, if you're snooping all the traffic anyway. You can probably even do this by looking at the timings, if it's encrypted. If you see an outbound request with no inbound request in the n preceding milliseconds (established empirically) then it's pretty obvious that it was a request originating at that node. Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.
Freenet might work if you only look at one-way traffic from one node at a time, but the people that it was built to circumvent - governments - have the resources to take a wider view.